28

Allowed to Fail

AT some point towards the end of the race, I don’t know when, I heard a guy talking in my ear.

‘My wife’s a professional,’ he said. ‘We’ve both been doing this for years and I’ve been in your situation several times. Just get to the end. If you don’t you’ll feel worse, trust me on that. You’re allowed to fail. You’re just not allowed to give up. Just get to the end.’

At 20 miles, still throwing up, I found myself next to a runner in a worse state than I was. He was six feet tall, long and lean. The veins in his arms and thighs all stood out on his flesh, like a map of his suffering. He was so pale he was almost transparent.

‘I’m going to tell you something now,’ he said, voice like a ghost. ‘And I bet you won’t believe me.’

‘What?’

‘I can run a marathon in two hours 35.’

I looked at my watch. It was four hours 15 minutes since I got off the bike. I tried to smile.

‘Do you know what mate?’ I said. ‘You’re right, I don’t believe you!’

Both of us laughed through our torment.

Without knowing how, I kept putting one foot in front of the other. At one point, after what seemed like an eternity of further suffering, I found myself on the verge of passing out, doubled over, with my hands on my knees. The road under my feet looked yielding, so comfortable. The temptation to sink to it was compelling.

People around began to scream. ‘You’re there, you’re there, you’ve nearly finished! Get going!’

I raised my head and saw I was actually at the mouth of the finishing chute. There were only 200m left. Eyes shut, I staggered through.

It would be nice to say I felt some achievement in completing that race, in crossing the line against the odds, but it would also be a lie. My only sensation was relief that the torture was over. I flopped on to a chair as a marshal handed me a water bottle. I swigged from it before throwing up in my lap, exhausted, dizzy and dejected. Darren and Terry came over to console me.

‘Your Achilles heel,’ Terry said, ‘is the fact that you could suffer. Other people would have eased up on the training when you started getting ill. Your biggest strength was also your weakness.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to both of them. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Darren said. ‘We’re still proud.’

He meant well, but I didn’t want sympathy. I had no interest in my time or where I had placed. I knew both would be awful. A nurse checked me over and said I needed to see the doctor. In the medical tent he asked when I had last eaten.

‘At 80km on the bike,’ I said.

‘So you cycled another 100km and then ran a marathon without eating? Is that what you’re telling me?’

I nodded.

They conducted tests and found my blood sugar levels were dangerously low. I was also severely dehydrated. For several hours they kept me there for rehydration and stabilisation. When they finally let me go I had to leave my car in Bolton and Terry drove me to the hotel in Rochdale where I was staying.

That night I continued using the special rehydration supplements and reflected, with a new-found humility. I had not shown the race enough respect. It was as simple as that. Arrogance had tripped me up.

I had believed I could breeze through it, but it had breezed through me. Terry was right. The Graham Obree approach did not work for me. I was too intense, too driven. There was a chance of doing myself serious harm.

If I did not change my mindset, this situation could repeat itself. Evolution was needed and I would have to swallow my pride, reach out, put my trust in someone else and work with a coach.

Almost as if it was pre-ordained, Keith phoned me as soon as I returned to London.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

I explained about my health issues and he sympathised, but suggested I would probably have been better off pulling out, recovering properly and entering another race later in the year. Keith had come second in his age group in a sprint finish. He had only missed out on first by two seconds and qualified for the world championships in Kona.

‘I actually ran past you on the marathon,’ he said. ‘You didn’t see me because you were in such a bad way. You over-trained, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, feeling meek. ‘Do you think I could have a look at your training programme?’

‘Of course,’ he said gently, ‘no problem, of course.’

He e-mailed me some documents which I looked through but did not fully understand, so after he had completed his race in Hawaii, in early October, he offered to meet at a lido in Charlton to explain.

‘Look,’ he said as we sat by the pool. ‘I’ve gone as far as I can go in the sport, I’ve done Hawaii, so I’m retiring from competition. I’m setting up my own coaching company, Perform Fitness. You’re a naturally gifted athlete, so if you’re interested, no obligation, I’ll coach you for free.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. I’ve trained with you. I’ve followed your times online. I know how much you underperformed in Bolton. Maybe right now I’m the only one who does. If we can make you into a top Ironman and I think we can, it’ll be great promotion for me.’

His words were music to my ears. ‘You’re on.’

‘But listen, if you want to optimise every session, you also have to optimise the time between each session,’ he explained. ‘Recovery, hydration, nutrition, stretching, massage, all these elements are as important as what you do in the water, on the saddle or on the road. You have to pick targets and aim for them. It’s like a world champion boxer with a title fight three months away. He needs to be at his best then. No one can peak all year around.’

From that day on, I put my trust in Keith. Terry remained my performance coach and sports psychologist but Keith looked after the physical side. With his wealth of experience, he could only improve me.

It was a while before we started work, because the terrible ordeal I had put my body through in Bolton disrupted the arrhythmia of my heart. My resting heart rate had gone from 38 to 64.

The cardiologist at St Mary’s Hospital gave me a 24-hour ECG and concluded that my training should be capped at 20 minutes a day for a month. At the time it felt like some sort of death sentence but Keith said it would be good for me. I eased into it and used the opportunity to have a bit of downtime.

I went out with the guys from the rowing club, ate some bad food, drank beer, got plenty of sleep and generally enjoyed myself. My body fat had dropped to five per cent in the build-up to the race, so I had a bit of room to play with. I even went on a few dates, although I still found forming those kinds of relationships uncomfortable since leaving prison.

The rest was needed, much as I struggled to admit it and I began feeling healthier and happier than I had in a long time. Sometimes it’s only when you step out of that bubble you realise how all-consuming it is.

Once we did begin, in November, refreshed and re-energised, I followed the sessions Keith told me to do, when he told me to do them. He placed critical importance on the concept of heart-rate zones.

I would do two hard sessions a week, for example a bike and a run, in which I would run to my threshold, meaning the upper limit of my heart rate. Other days I might do a longer activity, but at lower intensity, meaning I was keeping myself ticking over, without putting too much strain on my system.

My particular focus was on the marathon and Keith understood my reasons. The swim and the cycle had both been pretty poor, but it had been the marathon that crushed me. My aim was to go to Bolton again in 2015 and run one of the fastest marathons on the day. If I did, I knew I could place well.

Keith wrote my training programme on to Training Peaks, an app you can download for smartphones or laptops. After every session my heart rate readings, my bike wattage and times would have to be entered on to the chart, meaning Keith could keep a firm grasp on my exact fitness levels during each training block, before setting targets for the next one. This is the kind of coaching involved in Ironman training, which is very different to most other sports. The sessions are so long, often involving being out on a bike or running for half a day at a time, that a coach cannot be physically present for all of it, but they can still guide and give advice from afar.

At the highest levels endurance sport is tied up with intimate understandings of physiology and body chemistry, becoming scientific and mathematical. Up to that point I had avoided most of that, believing I could do without it, but Keith brought it into my regime.

On my training runs I no longer ran at one, consistent pace, or various speeds as I felt. Before I would go to Richmond Park with a particular distance in mind and simply try to run it as quickly as possible, but Keith would cap my splits, meaning that for the first half hour I would run each kilometre in four minutes 30 seconds, then do 30 minutes at four minutes 20 per km, followed by 30 minutes at four minutes per km. The numbers would vary from session to session but there was always adaptation involved, an element of change and a pre-set pace I would have to stick to.

On the bike too it became more about intervals and holding certain ranges for periods of time. The idea was to increase my top-end power, which was where my talents lay. My physique was naturally stronger than many triathletes, meaning I could put more through the pedals than most. Keith would give me periods where I would have to maintain Ironman race power, then maybe follow that with a period where I would have to up it to half-Ironman power (because the half-Ironman race is shorter, the power requirements are more intense).

In the water, sessions became more technical, and sprints and repetitions formed a major part of my approach. Keith brought his business partner, Bruno, down to watch me swim. A former naval special forces operative in Belgium, Bruno was a top-end endurance coach himself with a speciality in swimming. He asked me to do 20 100m repetitions, with a ten-second rest between each, to observe my form. I held a time of one minute 46 seconds per hundred, which was awful.

Keith and Bruno spent a great deal of time improving my technique, working on my body position in the water, the efficiency of my stroke, the strength of my leg kick. With sustained effort I improved to the point that I could maintain one minute 35 per 100m, without stopping, for the full Ironman race distance of 3.86km.

In April I headed back out to the Alps with Hywel and his crew, enjoying the challenge of real mountain-riding again. Unlike the previous year I felt more secure in my own position and resisted the urge to go flat out at all times. Once again, it was a great camp.

As the 2015 race approached, my confidence soared and my innate abilities turned up surprising results. It seemed the longer and harder the session, the better I became. We found that on a long cycle, even if I maintained my power output, my heart rate would remain consistent. Sometimes it would even fall slightly. I was then able to get off the bike and run at my maximum heart rate from the beginning of the marathon until the end. This wasn’t something I had ever trained or developed, although I suppose the rowing gave me a solid base. It was just something within my physiology. I thought about my previous ability to stay icy-calm before and during a robbery, to always hold my nerve. Maybe that was also attributable to the same thing?

All I still lacked was race experience, but of course, we knew there was only one way to get that. The coming years would be crucial. 2015 would still only be my third full Ironman event.

Three weeks before Ironman UK 2015 I competed the half-Ironman at Wimbleball. The weather was dreadful, slashing down with rain, but the race went well other than the fact I had decided to run tubular race tyres on my bike. ‘Tubs’, as they are known, have no inner tube and are the fastest race tyres you can buy, but as they are glued on to the wheel, puncture repair becomes problematic.

One of the features of the Wimbleball course, in common with many of the British Ironman events, is that the bike leg is very technical, traversing lots of narrow, winding country roads. Unfortunately, the rain had scattered loose soil, grit, leaves and twigs over the road surfaces and as a result, it was often impossible to see what you were riding on.

Ten kilometres into the bike stage the inevitable happened and I got a front wheel puncture. I stopped to attend to it, using Pit-Stop foam to reseal the tyre, but made a silly mistake of forgetting to spin the wheel when I did so. Without that, the foam failed to coat the whole inner surface of the tyre. I used a CO2 canister to re-inflate, but my incorrect use of the Pit-Stop meant the puncture had not been repaired.

In a sense I was lucky. It was not a complete blowout, rather a slow release of pressure, but with progressively less and less air in my front wheel, my speed reduced dramatically and I finished the course riding on the rim, with only a thin coating of rubber preventing the carbon fibre from being worn down on the road.

From the moment the puncture happened, I changed my tactics and treated Wimbleball as another training day. I completed the bike leg in just under three hours, which considering the extra toll the puncture took on my legs was not too bad. On the run I moved freely, with no pressure. It was an extremely hilly course and I was able to claw back a few positions from those who struggled on the inclines. I ran a one hour 27 half-marathon, the fourth fastest time on the day, which left me in 28th place overall. I accepted it without too much over-analysis.

Keith and I had set an immediate aim of a top ten finish in Bolton, which would give me world ranking points and be very credible in only my third full race. Secretly, we thought there was a good chance I could win it. At that moment Ironman UK was all I cared about.